To the uninformed, surveys appear to be an easy type of research to design and conduct, but when students and professionals delve deeper, they encounter the vast complexities that the range and practice of survey methods present. To complicate matters, technology has rapidly affected the way surveys can be conducted; today, surveys are conducted via cell phone, the Internet, email, interactive voice response, and other technology-based modes. Thus, students, researchers, and professionals need both a comprehensive understanding of these complexities and a revised set of tools to meet the challenges. In conjunction with top survey researchers around the world and with Nielsen Media Research serving as the corporate sponsor, the Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods presents state-of-the-art information and methodological examples from the field of survey research. Although there are other "how-to" guides and references texts on survey research, none is as comprehensive as this Encyclopedia, and none presents the material in such a focused and approachable manner. With more than 600 entries, this resource uses a Total Survey Error perspective that considers all aspects of possible survey error from a cost-benefit standpoint. Key Features Covers all major facets of survey research methodology, from selecting the sample design and the sampling frame, designing and pretesting the questionnaire, data collection, and data coding, to the thorny issues surrounding diminishing response rates, confidentiality, privacy, informed consent and other ethical issues, data weighting, and data analyses Presents a Reader′s Guide to organize entries around themes or specific topics and easily guide users to areas of interest Offers cross-referenced terms, a brief listing of Further Readings, and stable Web site URLs following most entries The Encyclopedia of Survey Research Methods is specifically written to appeal to beginning, intermediate, and advanced students, practitioners, researchers, consultants, and consumers of survey-based information.

From making presentations to general versus technical/academic audiences to preparing computerized presentations, this book shows you how to create more effective verbal and written survey reports.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was introduced on December 2, 1970 by President Richard Nixon. The agency is charged with protecting human health and the environment, by writing and enforcing regulations based on laws passed by Congress. The EPA's struggle to protect health and the environment is seen through each of its official publications. These publications outline new policies, detail problems with enforcing laws, document the need for new legislation, and describe new tactics to use to solve these issues. This collection of publications ranges from historic documents to reports released in the new millennium, and features works like: Bicycle for a Better Environment, Health Effects of Increasing Sulfur Oxides Emissions Draft, and Women and Environmental Health.

It is easy to underestimate how little was known about crimes and victims before the findings of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) became common wisdom. In the late 1960s, knowledge of crimes and their victims came largely from reports filed by local police agencies as part of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system, as well as from studies of the files held by individual police departments. Criminologists understood that there existed a "dark figure" of crime consisting of events not reported to the police. However, over the course of the last decade, the effectiveness of the NCVS has been undermined by the demands of conducting an increasingly expensive survey in an effectively flat-line budgetary environment. Surveying Victims: Options for Conducting the National Crime Victimization Survey, reviews the programs of the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS.) Specifically, it explores alternative options for conducting the NCVS, which is the largest BJS program. This book describes various design possibilities and their implications relative to three basic goals; flexibility, in terms of both content and analysis; utility for gathering information on crimes that are not well reported to police; and small-domain estimation, including providing information on states or localities. This book finds that, as currently configured and funded, the NCVS is not achieving and cannot achieve BJS's mandated goal to "collect and analyze data that will serve as a continuous indication of the incidence and attributes of crime." Accordingly, Surveying Victims recommends that BJS be afforded the budgetary resources necessary to generate accurate measure of victimization.